Instead of rectangular columns, some commercial publications such as magazines or brochures often mix text and images freely on a page. Rather than leaving a rectangular area around each image with a lot of empty white space, text flows naturally around the actual boundary of the image.
At present, flowing text around an irregular image using contemporary, known software can only be done by having a user perform a lot of work to specify the irregular boundary of the shape. To do this, the user manipulates a device such as a mouse to indirectly create a set of curves that resemble the image boundary. This is very difficult because of the inability to accurately capture the intent of the user. Alternatively, the user may insert tabs and spaces into the text to manually move where each line of text starts and/or ends, but this is time-consuming.